Family Structure Quotes & Sayings

The structure of the family is not born in nature but in human design. What we can do, we can also undo. — Lillian B. Rubin

Could it be that the atomic isolation of the husband and wife nucleus with an orbiting child or two is in fact a culturally imposed aberration for our species? As ill-suited to our evolved tendencies as corsets, chastity belts, and suits of armor? ... a distorted and distorting family structure inappropriate for our species? — Christopher Ryan

Love and this close-knit family structure really helped to give me the confidence. To know that you have family to go back to is a help. It doesn't always happen biologically. Sometimes God gives you family in other forms, but I was very blessed. I have a very strong biological family. — Lauryn Hill

The care of children ..is infinitely better left to the best trained practitioners of both sexes who have chosen it as a vocation ... [This] would further undermine family structure while contributing to the freedom of women. — Kate Millett

Almost every woman had a primary role in the "female-dominated" family structure; only a small percentage of men had a primary role in the "male-dominated" governmental and religious structures. Many mothers were, in a sense, the chair of the board of a small company - their family. Even in Japan, women are in charge of the family finances - a fact that was revealed to the average American only after the Japanese stock market crashed in 1992 and thousands of women lost billions of dollars that their husbands never knew they had invested.23 Conversely, most men were on their company's assembly line - either its physical assembly line or its psychological assembly line. — Warren Farrell

The truth is, the liberal policies of the elite class have done little to improve the lot of those who depend so much on them. In America's black communities, where the goodies have been flowing for decades, rather than seeing improvements in terms of upward mobility, we are seeing deteriorating family structure, increases in violent crimes, growing poverty, and growing dependence. Even with such a blatant record of failure, there is slavish devotion to the elite class who continue to promise more goodies in exchange for votes. — Benjamin Carson

To be sure, changes in American family structure have been fairly continuous since the first European settlements, but today thesechanges seem to be occurring so rapidly that the shift is no longer a simple extension of long-term trends. We have passed a genuine watershed: this is the first time in our history that the typical school-age child has a mother who works outside the home. — Kenneth Keniston

A woman can take care of the family. It takes a man to provide structure, to provide stability. Not that I'm saying a woman can't provide stability, I'm not saying that ... It does take a father though. — Tom DeLay

The institution of marriage would be damaged. Ideologically, marital morality must be kept intact, in spite of the contradictory facts of sexual life, because marriage is the backbone of the authoritarian family, which in turn is the breeding ground for authoritarian ideologies and character structure. — Wilhelm Reich

If you come from a solid family structure, it doesn't matter what you go through in your life. You're going to be okay. — Alyssa Milano

The aging and declining population will have far-reaching impacts. Declining fertility rates will possibly increase immigration. The structure of family and society will inevitably change. — Toshihiko Fukui

The family is the simplest and smallest unit of society and the real fountain of culture. If this fountain remains pure, man's culture has promise. But if it becomes polluted, all the rest will turn to dust and ashes, since the home is the foundation of the entire social structure. — Henry R. Van Til

It's a house. No more and no less. There isn't a structure on earth that could last forever. But a family goes on.
-Leo — Lisa Kleypas

Why will the Structure allow every other kind of sexual behavior but that one? Because submission and dominance are resources it needs for its very survival. They cannot be wasted in private sex. In any kind of sex. It needs our submission so that it can co-opt us into its own power game. There is no joy in it, only power. I tell you, if S and M could be established universally, at the family level, the State would wither away. — Thomas Pynchon

The black family unit that had survived 150 years of slavery was decimated in less than 30 years by welfare payments that stopped if the family structure remained intact. — Larry Burkett

Families come into therapy with their own structure, and tone, and rules. Their organization, their pattern, has been established over years of living, and it is extremely meaningful and very painful for them. They would not be in therapy if they were happy with it. But however faulty, the family counts on the familiarity and predictability of their world. If they are going to turn loose this painful predictability and attempt to reorganize themselves, they need firm external support. The family crucible must has a shape, a form, a discipline of sorts, and the therapist has to provide it. The family has to know whether we can provide it, and so they test us. — Augustus Y. Napier

Sleeping with your child, wearing your child in a sling as opposed to pushing them around in expensive strollers, those are things that matter biologically and sociologically for the structure of a family. — Mayim Bialik

And whereas women had to fight to find their way into the workforce, men are now fighting to reclaim their place in the family structure. — Bob Geldof

I really admire the job that not just coach Belichick has done but that Robert Kraft and his family have done, and the decisions that they made to let Bill do what he's capable of doing. I think it's a great illustration of a way to structure an NFL organization when you let the coach really run the thing. — Pete Carroll

family structure that produces the best outcomes for children, on average, are two biological parents who remain married. Divorced parents produce the next-best outcomes. Whether the parents remarry or remain single while the children are growing up makes little difference. Never-married women produce the worst outcomes. All of these statements apply after controlling for the family's socioeconomic status.14 I know of no other set of important findings that are as broadly accepted by social scientists who follow the technical literature, liberal as well as conservative, and yet are so resolutely ignored by network news programs, editorial writers for the major newspapers, and politicians of both major political parties. In — Charles Murray

We have so many young men, especially, who are growing up without their dads. We have to fill that void. We have to do a better job helping young people see what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman. And then, somehow, we have to put that family structure back together. — Tony Dungy

Loft living is the antithesis of suburban domesticity, if only because the open spaces don't easily accommodate family life. Lofts also offer residents the opportunity - and responsibility - to structure their own space to reflect what's important to them. — Virginia Postrel

If we wish to have a beautiful, peaceful and safe home, we need healthy expanding roots that go deep into the ground. These roots are our Routine, our Stability, our Structure. — Natasa Nuit Pantovic

For our family, the entire structure of our life, our home, our business relationships - the entire purpose is for everyone to be able to create in a way that makes them happy. Fame is almost an inconsequential by-product of what we're really trying to accomplish. We are trying to put great things into the world, we're trying to have fun, and we're trying to become the greatest versions of ourselves in the process of doing things we love. — Will Smith

THE DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY RULES 1. Control or Chaos. One must be in control of all interactions, feelings and personal behavior at all times - control is the major defense strategy for shame. In the less-than-human shameless marriage, both parents may be cocaine addicts or addicted in other ways. They may be dishonest criminals. The children experience chaos, as well as secrecy rules that guard their family's behavior. 2. Perfectionism or Anomie. Always be right in everything you do. The perfectionist rule always involves an imposed measurement. The fear and avoidance of the negative is the organizing principle of life. The members live according to an externalized image. No one ever measures up. In the less-than-human family, there are no rules - the children have no structure to guide them. — John Bradshaw

In the traditional family structure of Persia ... one simply cannot discard close relatives just because one does not like them; rather one has to accommodate them, make allowances and accept them, like misfortune. — Shusha Guppy

I grew up in a working-class Israeli family, which was feminist only in its female-dominated structure. — Hanna Rosin

The most depressing part is that relationship instability, like home chaos, is a vicious cycle. As sociologists Paula Fornby and Andrew Cherlin found, a "growing body of literature suggests that children who experience multiple transitions in family structure may fare worse developmentally than children raised in stable two-parent families and perhaps even than children raised in stable, single-parent families." For — J.D. Vance

I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me. The thought of being a lawyer or a councilman or an engineer, anything like that, seemed impossible to me. To get married, to have children, to get trapped in the family structure. To go someplace to work every day and to return. It was impossible. To do things, simple things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother's Day ... was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep. — Charles Bukowski

Seeking the pleasure of conjugality without a willingness to assume the responsibilities of rearing a family is one of the onslaughts that now batter at the structure of the American home. Intelligence and mutual consideration should be ever-present factors in determining the coming of children to the home. — David O. McKay

We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time. — Barack Obama

Some even believe we (the Rockefeller family) are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure - one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it. — David Rockefeller

I really believe, in my heart and soul, that if we would rebuild and strengthen the family structure in the country, you'd start to really deal with a number of the most difficult problems we're having in the country today, in poverty, education, and in crime, but we've broken the family structure up. — Sam Brownback

General Systems Theory, a related modern concept [to holism], says that each variable in any system interacts with the other variables so thoroughly that cause and effect cannot be separated. A simple variable can be both cause and effect. Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart! You cannot understand a cell, a rat, a brain structure, a family, a culture if you isolate it from its context. Relationship is everything. — Marilyn Ferguson

Commercial agriculture can survive within pluralistic American society, as we know it - if the farm is rebuilt on some of the values with which it is popularly associated: conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community. To sustain itself, commercial agriculture will have to reorganize its social and economic structure as well as its technological base and production methods in a way that reinforces these values. — Marty Strange

You can't hide behind race any more. You can't hide behind class structure any more. You can't hide behind family. You need to produce. — Mitch Landrieu

What I have found is that, in a family business structure, sometimes what is needed is a sense of discipline rather than creativity. You have to take everyone's ideas and make it work. When you are dealing with money, there is a limitation on how creative you can be. — Ashwin Sanghi

Whether we want to own up to it or not, the welfare state has done what Jim Crow, gross discrimination and poverty could not have done. It has contributed to the breakdown of the black family structure and has helped establish a set of values alien to traditional values of high moral standards, hard work and achievement. — Walter E. Williams

Most people believe that sharing the same flesh and blood, the same basic DNA structure, makes them your family. How sad that is. Because, you see, as a spiritual person, I believe you must deserve a family, not just own it. If those that are my family, don't behave as such, they are not my family. If I have chosen them before I was born, I have been betrayed. I owe them nothing, in this or the many lives to come. In fact, if they betray me in this life, they will return as my enemies in the next. And their karma will make me victorious in that future confrontation. — Robin Sacredfire

Everyone needs a house to live in, but a supportive family is what builds a home. — Anthony Liccione

... the traditional family structure that More supported in her writings enabled women to 'be intelligent, rational, virtuous, and noble creatures, capable of great intellectual and moral achievements. They had the potential for immense influence on their husbands and sons, on their relations, their servants, and the poor.' More held, therefore, ... 'the ideal of rational domesticity helped to liberate the individual within a supportive family framework. — Karen Swallow Prior

[About gorillas] You take these fine, regal animals. How many (human) fathers have the same sense of paternity? How many human mothers are more caring? The family structure is unbelievably strong. — Dian Fossey

Dr. King kept guns in his home to protect himself and his family. After firebombing and numerous death threats by racists, his application for a permit to carry a gun was denied by the 'may issue' white power structure (Democrat) in that time and place. Let the holiday that celebrates this man's life include some reflection on the importance of the Second Amendment. — Massad Ayoob

Forget family, or ethnic and religious groupings: corporations have supplanted all these as the primary structure of the modern tribe. — Tom McCarthy

It is understandable how this shame came into being. The nation made the black man's color a stigma. Even linguistics and semantics conspire to give this impression. If you look in Roget's Thesaurus you will find about 120 synonyms for blacK, and right down the line you will find words like smut, something dirty, worthless, and useless, and then you look further and you find about 120 synonyms for white and they all represent something high, noble, pure, chaste - right down the line. In our language structure, a white lie is a little better than a black lie. Somebody goes wrong in the family and we don't call him a white sheep, we call him a black sheep. We don't say whitemail, but blackmail. We don't speak of white-balling somebody, but black-balling somebody. The word 'black' itself in our society connotes something that is degrading. It was absolutely necessary to come to a moment with a sense of dignity. It is very positive and very necessary. — Martin Luther King Jr.

I wanted some family structure and stability, and that's what The Partridge Family afforded me, not only financially but in the fact that I could be at home with my kids. — Shirley Jones

Yes, there are passages in Scripture - especially in Paul's epistles - about women's roles. But it is biblically untenable and soul crushing to tell a woman that the only worthwhile activity she can do is to birth children and serve a husband and a family. This mind-set also creates an idol out of the family structure, making success as a homemaker/mother the most important vocation in a woman's life. And although this is a high calling, it should not trump our first and foremost calling: to believe in Christ. — Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

The individual psychotherapy patient comes to the therapist with an almost automatic deference, a sense of dependence and compliance. The role pattern is old and established: the dependent child seeking guidance from a parent figure. There is no such traditional image for the family, no established pattern in which an entire family submits to the guidance of an individual. And the family structure is simply too powerful and too crucial for the members to go trustingly into an experience that threatens to change the entire matrix of their relationships. If the family therapist is to acquire that initial "authority figure" or "parent" role that is so necessary if therapy is to be more powerful than an ordinary social experience, he has to earn it. — Augustus Y. Napier

Extended discourse, whether in the form of novels or expository treatises, presents the mind with a category of stimuli that can guide thinking though a long, complex, and coherent line of reasoning. Books structure ideas almost uniquely: The vocabulary and thought forms that are commonplace in book-length texts are rare in daily conversations. Books present a much wider range of vocabulary, concepts, and inferences than can be found in our daily banter with friends and family members. — Michael E. Martinez

You ask me what it means to be irrelevant? The feeling is akin to visiting your old house as a wandering ghost with unfinished business. Imagine going back: the structure is familiar ,but the door is now metal instead of wood,the walls have been painted a garish pink ,the easy chair you loved so much is gone .Your office is now the family room and your beloved bookcases have been replaced by a brand-new television set . This is your house,and it is not. And you are no longer relevant to this house , to its walls and doors and floors ; you are not seen . — Azar Nafisi

Yet alongside this rebellion against the father, a respect for and acceptance of his authority continued to exist. This ambivalent attitude toward authority - rebellion against it coupled with acceptance and submission - is a basic feature of every middle-class structure from the age of puberty to full adulthood and is especially pronounced in individuals stemming from materially restricted circumstances. — Wilhelm Reich

The ideal structure for a family is one that remains so. — Jacquelyn Mitchard

The father-mother-son that makes up the basic family unit, at least as the Family has described it for centuries now, represents a power structure, a structure of strong powers, mediating powers, and subordinate powers, as well as paths for power developments and power restrictions. — Samuel R. Delany

I wish I could separate trauma from politics, but as long as we continue to live in denial and treat only trauma while ignoring its origins, we are bound to fail. In today's world your ZIP code, even more than your genetic code, determines whether you will lead a safe and healthy life. People's income, family structure, housing, employment, and educational opportunities not only affect their risk of developing traumatic stress but also their access to effective help to address it. Poverty, unemployment, inferior schools, social isolation, widespread availability of guns, and substandard housing all are breeding grounds for trauma. Trauma breeds further trauma; hurt people hurt other people. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Nonetheless, by the time we arrive at the eighteenth century and the time of the founders, marriage and the family came to look very much as Aristotle had pictured it. In the previous centuries, Lutheran reforms had lodged marriage into the civil structure of society and made it more a concern of civil law,11 but, joined by Calvin, Protestantism retained parental control over the right of children to marry. John Locke, however, saw marriage as contracted political society, and thus his image of the family as a commonwealth made up of combined individuals parallel his image of the formation of the larger political commonwealth as well.12 Furthermore, Locke declares that parents are, "by the law of nature, under an obligation to preserve, nourish and educate" their children.13 Since government is instituted to enforce the laws of nature, Locke states that government should make laws that enforce "the security of the marriage bed.'14 What — Jean Bethke Elshtain

There's no traditional three act structure - or beginning, middle and end - to a family tree. By its nature, it has almost infinite different branches, or episodes, to explore in every direction. — Jim Piddock

Eyebrows are really important because they structure the face. In school it was funny because I was always the one walking around with tweezers plucking my girlfriends' eyebrows. I was really good; eyebrow tweezing runs in my family - my mother used to do mine, and I picked it up. — Rita Ora

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family. — William Jones

As a society, we've evolved, and we've recognized that the American family structure has undergone enormous changes. Divorce is all around us, and who among us doesn't know someone who is divorced or has been impacted by divorce. It's not as scandalous as it was. — Laura Wasser

If you go from a structure where you have the support and that partner and that construction of a family and that's broken apart, I think that's probably a lot harder than always being a single mom and having the father being a support in another area. — Bridget Moynahan

Republicans need to stay strong on the fact that marriage is between a man and a woman. Those are values that are true to the party and true to who we are. They could focus on jobs and the economy, but we all know that keeping the family structure intact is very important in our country. — Nikki Haley

Because orgasmic sex would lead to women's autonomy, knowing who you are and what we want: Women are not going to follow what some jackass tells us we must do. Not all women are going to get married, be monogamous and raise a family. It will destroy the current social structure based on a sexual double standard that we're currently living under. — Betty Dodson

We Liberal Democrats don't believe we should use the tax structure to champion just one type of family. — Charles Kennedy

The psychological attitudes which are indispensable in the American market place are disastrous to family life. Family life ... requires yieldingness, generosity, sympathy, altruism, tenderness-all the qualities, in fact, which lead straight to bankruptcy ... the American family is tragically out of gear with the profit structure which has mushroomed up around it. — Margaret Halsey

(liberal individualism triumphed as long as it undermined intermediate structures such as nations, corporations, castes, but when it attacked that ultimate social structure, the family, and thus the birthrate, it signed its own death warrant; Muslim dominance was a foregone conclusion). — Michel Houellebecq

Everything has changed in recent decades - the economy, technology, cultural attitudes, the demographics of the workforce, the role of women in society and the structure of the American family. It's about time our laws caught up. We watch 'Modern Family' on television, but we're still living by 'Leave It To Beaver' rules. — Thomas Perez

For immigrant generations especially, family is the first structure, or shelter, for a people who are in exile. — Alice McDermott

Our structure has always been two homes, and that's all my son has ever known. So you balance it. Make sure you have good support with your family and friends and nannies. — Bridget Moynahan

The steady expansion of welfare programs can be taken as a measure of the steady disintegration of the Negro family structure over the past generation in the United States. — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

I've lived my life in the structure of the Jedi Order. Yes, it was an organization with a goal- but it was also a family. I said it myself: Anakin was my brother. I had many brothers and sisters. And fathers and mothers. And even a strange little green uncle. I don't have that home now. I don't have that family. Almost every friend I've ever had is dead. — John Jackson Miller

What does it take to build something so that it's really easy to make comfortable little modifications in a way that once you've made them, they feel integral with the nature and structure of what is already there? You want to be able to mess around with it and progressively change it to bring it into an adapted state with yourself, your family, the climate, whatever. This kind of adaptation is a continuous process of gradually taking care. — Stewart Brand

Arranged marriages are big business in the U.K. Second- and third-generation immigrant families, with no extended family structure, limited networks and religious restrictions on acceptable ways to meet future spouses, are turning to external matchmakers for help. — Jemima Khan

The Treatise tries to analyze not only modern Western families, but also those in other cultures and the changes in family structure during the past several centuries. — Gary Becker